Shantaram

Recently I finished one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts.  While long, at nearly 1000 pages, it is truly a worth it.

The book is based on Roberts life following his escape from a maximum security prison in Australia, where he was serving a 19 year sentence.  He soon found himself in Bombay where he lived in a slum, established a free health clinic, joined the Mumbai mafia, worked as a money launderer, forger and street solider.  He also found time to learn Hindi and Marathi, fall in love, act in Bollywood, be imprisoned once again in an Indian jail before going to fight with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.  As you can see 1000 pages is barley enough to cover this fictionalized account of his life.

What I liked most about this book was the way he brought Mumbai alive. He really managed to capture the complexity of the City and a nuanced and compassionate look at life in the slums. He shows how a community of 25,000 people in an area the size of a couple of city blocks finds ways to polices itself and survive, how they prepare for the yearly monsoons, fight fires.  I look forward to a screen adaptation as well.  Shantaram is in production and  Johnny Depp will be playing Gregory David Roberts.

For just a small feel of his writing and how he brings Mumbai alive I’ll leave you with  this quotation and a video of Roberts describing his first day in Bombay Slum.

The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Bombay minute, escaped from prison and new to the wide world, but I didn’t and couldn’t recognize it. I know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It’s the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It’s the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense and freshly cut flowers. Karla once called it the worst good smell in the world, and she was right, of course, in that way she had of being right about things. But whenever I return to Bombay, now it’s my first sense of the city – that smell, above all things – that welcomes me and tells me I’ve come home….

I hope you pick up the book.  It was truly a great read.